Barrack Obama claims the U.S. had ‘gotten a little soft’ in the last couple decades and needs to ‘get back on track’.

The president was talking about the state of the economy during an interview with a local TV station from Orlando, Florida, when he made the comments.

He told WESH-TV’s Jim Payne: ‘The way I think about it is, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades.

‘We need to get back on track.’

Mr. Obama has faced heavy criticism for his handling of the economy, and the current unemployment rate of 9.1 per cent is threatening his re-election bid.

He acknowledged that with the current economic climate it is a particularly ‘challenging’ time for young people.

He said: ‘Even before the financial crisis hit, one of the reasons that I ran for president was that wages – incomes had flat-lined at the same time that costs were going up.

‘I think people felt that opportunities were becoming more constricted for the next generation.’

‘And that’s why making sure that we’re revamping our education system, making sure we’ve got world class infrastructure, investing in basic science, research and technology, making sure that we are moving manufacturing to the US, and that we are being tough with our trading partners, making sure that they’re not taking advantage of us.

Americans are too soft.

I kind of view that in terms of a parent who says his kid is fat, and we’re supposed to forget the fact that it was that damned parent who kept stuffing the kid’s face with high-calorie foods.

Truman had that now famous slogan on his desk: “The buck stops here.” Obama did a little editing on his sign: “The buck stops anywhere but here.”

All I can say is that I don’t particularly need a week, scrawny, dumbo-eared pathetic whiner who frankly isn’t man enough to accept responsibility for anything calling me or my fellow Americans “soft.”

After introducing who Cloward and Piven were and what they tried to do to implode and destroy America from within, I stated:

On my own view, Obama has a “win we win, lose we win” strategy. To wit, the Obama administration and the Democrat Party are pursuing incredibly risky policies across the board. If the country and the economy somehow manages to survive these measures (which I would compare to a man surviving a poisoning), Obama and the Democrats will claim victory. If, on the other hand, the entire national system collapses due to these shockingly terrible policies, the liberals believe that a terrified, hungry public will turn to the government for help – and allow the statists to restructure the nation into a completely socialist system.

The Obama administration, on my view, consists of a collective of fiscal sociopaths. They don’t even care about the harm that they are doing, as long as they accomplish their self-serving objective of statism, in which they ultimately wield the levers of totalitarian power.

On top of the disastrous impact on patient care would be the disastrous impact on the national economy. The health care system that the Senate Democrats would impose on Americans would cost at least $2.5 trillion every ten years following its initial roll-out. How much more can we afford? How many more cards can we add to our house before the whole thing comes crashing down?

Why would anybody want to impose a system that is so terribly bad, and which will cost so terribly much?

When you think of the trillions in spending that this administration has already accumulated, and then add the additional $200 billion a year (and $1,761 per family) cost of Obama’s cap-and-trade energy fiasco, you can’t help but begin to wonder if there is an intentional determination to overwhelm our system and “push society into crisis and economic collapse.”

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

PHILADELPHIA — The cost of health insurance skyrocketed in 2011 after several years of relatively small increases, according to a report released Tuesday by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation in California and the Health Research and Educational Trust in Chicago.

Prices rose 9 percent for family coverage, with the average family premium reaching $15,073 and employees picking up $4,129 of that cost.

In 2010, family premium prices rose 3 percent.

The premium increase far outstrips the 2.1 percent increase in workers’ wages and the 3.2 percent increase in the general inflation rate from April 2010 to April 2011.

“This year’s nine percent increase in premiums is especially painful for workers and employers struggling through a weak recovery,” Kaiser foundation president Drew Altman said in a statement.

But, but, Obama said he was going to bend the cost curve DOWN. He promised.

Every single thing that Barack Obama promised and every single thing that every single Democrat who shoved that communist piece of crap though Congress said was an abject lie.

And after EXACTLY what conservatives predicted would happened in fact happened, what do Democrats say? It’s the insurance companies’ faults.

Well, let me tell you something: by their “logic,” if I walk up to you and punch you in the face and you hit me back, I’m not to blame in any way; you’re reaction was YOURS. In the same way, if Obama and Democrats force insurance companies to provide all sorts of things that are going to cost them BILLIONS, it’s entirely their fault if they raised their premiums. And the Democrats punching them in the face had nothing whatsoever to do with them punching YOU back in your wallet.

Democrats are the Party of Evil. Hate me all you want for stating it that way, but it is the truth.

D. James Kennedy warned, “Watch out, Grandma and Grandpa! Because the generation that survived abortion will one day come after YOU.” And Democrats have tried to ensure that day with ObamaCare and its 160 death panels:

If Republicans can’t stop ObamaCare from being fully implemented, the soaring costs that we are already seeing will continue unabated. And because of Democrats, society will look at the out-of-control health care costs, and then they will look at the fact that fully 80% of health care resources are consumed by the elderly, and it will vote to murder grandma and grandpa just as surely as they voted to murder all of those innocent babies.

Either that, or we will have to choose instead to bankrupt America via the ObamaCare Cloward and Piven strategy so that Democrat-communists (yes, you read that right) can have the Marxism they’ve wanted ever since JFK died.

The 1611 King James Version was written quite a while before the global warming panic, and Jesus said in Luke 21: 25-26, “And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.”

That’s panic, folks. Over climate phenomena that we know will get worse and worse. Predicted 2,000 years ago by Jesus Himself.

We’ve had deadly flash floods, wildfires, hurricanes. We’ve had deadly droughts combined with extreme heat that in turn have caused enormous livestock and crop losses, and let’s not forget the giant wildfires that have ravaged several Western states. We had over 540 people lose their lives in tornadoes ALONE this year. We’ve even had earthquakes in the New York area. That quake caused the North Anna nuclear plant in Virginia to shut down due to damage. Earth quakes in New York and Virginia?

You look at every aspect of America and everything American, and we’re on our way down under Obama. And it’s going to end with America falling down hard and staying down for good.

Do you want more God damn America? Keep voting for Obama and keep voting for demonic Democrats and you’ll be sure to get more of it in spades.

Once we go bankrupt – and Democrats will settle for nothing less than total American bankruptcy – enter the Antichrist and enter the mark of the beast.

The hoofbeats of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are getting closer and closer. It’s nearly too late as it is.

Well, you voted for him, America. And now you’re going to pay for it and KEEP paying for it until at least one of your collective braincells starts working again and you vote for a Repulibcan landslide.

During an appearance on Morning Joe, Tuesday, Newsweek editor Tina Brown made an off-hand remark about Barack Obama, conceding that the politician “wasn’t ready” to be President. Brown has previously attacked Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives for daring to oppose the Obama

While discussing whether New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will change his mind and run for President, the former New Yorker editor blurted, “Actually, I just hope he doesn’t, because in the end, you know, his tremendous misgivings, maybe he is right. I mean, We had this with Obama. He wasn’t ready, it turns out, really.”

On December 31, 2009, Brown mocked Rush Limbaugh, who just hours earlier had been taken to the hospital with chest pains, as a “bad fairy” who ruined the magical story of Obama. She portrayed the radio host as “the bad fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening” and added, “…Rush Limbaugh utters the words, ‘I hope you fail.’ ‘I hope he fails,’ he said, and from that moment, the sort of the Pandora’s box opened.”

Her full quote on Limbaugh:

TINA BROWN: It’s got to be that incredible inauguration of Obama….You started the year with this huge festival of hope and renewal and everything is going to be so different now, and then, like the bad fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, Rush Limbaugh utters the words, ‘I hope you fail.”I hope he fails,’ he said, and from that moment, the sort of the Pandora’s box opened, and the rest of the year has been just this big discord and toxic atmosphere in politics and partisan divide and people shouting at each other and the Tea Parties and death panels.”

-Brown announcing her choice for the most important moment of 2009 on NBC’s Today December 31, 2009 a few hours after Limbaugh went to the hospital with chest pains.

TINA BROWN: But if he doesn’t feel ready to run- Actually, I just hope he doesn’t, because in the end, you know, his tremendous misgivings, maybe he is right. I mean, We had this with Obama. He wasn’t ready, it turns out, really.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Got four little kids.

BROWN: Maybe Christie isn’t ready. Maybe he feels like everybody wants him to but perhaps he does need longer.

ANDREA MITCHELL: But, Tina, you could also argue that he might have a better chance at this moment of becoming the president of the United States than being re-elected governor of new Jersey and given all of the problems of running that state.

Chris Christie at one point literally asked if he had to die to assure people that he really, really, really wasn’t going to run for president. This has nothing to do with Chris Christie.

This has everything to do with the useless idiot who clearly has no business sitting in the Oval Office.

For the record, I’ve said it again and again because Democrats have proved it over and over and over again: Democrats are fascists. The only thing they need to truly display their naked fascism is POWER.

“The utility of terror was multifaceted, but among its chief benefits was its tendency to maintain a permanent sense of crisis. Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.” – Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg, pp. 42-43. Copyright 2007.

I know what you’re thinking, liberal: “That bastard Jonah Goldberg got his hands on a time machine so he could summarize the Obama administration philosophy and label it as “fascist” before they said it back in 2007.”

There’s always a crisis with fascists. And fascists are always saying “Carpe diem.” And there’s also always a scapegoat. Big Brother had Emmanuel Goldstein. Adolf Hitler had the Jews. Barack Obama has George W. Bush. Heck, Soviet big government totalitarians even managed to blame seventy years of bad weather after their policies resulted in perpetual famine, having executed all the other viable scapegoats.

And again, here is yet another naked display of fascism. Too bad we didn’t have a Reichstag fire first to really give them a reason to abandon any pretense of democracy. And I’m sure a lot of Democrats cringed when they heard a fellow Democrat declare that we should suspend democracy; but only because they haven’t yet succeeded in taking away our guns first.

As a way to solve the national debt crisis, North Carolina Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue recommends suspending congressional elections for the next couple of years.

“I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover,” Perdue said at a rotary club event in Cary, N.C., according to the Raleigh News & Observer. “I really hope that someone can agree with me on that.”

Perdue said she thinks that temporarily halting elections would allow members of Congress to focus on the economy. “You have to have more ability from Congress, I think, to work together and to get over the partisan bickering and focus on fixing things,” Perdue said.

North Carolina Republicans immediately scoffed at Perdue’s proposal, pointing out to her that elections hold politicians accountable for their actions.

“Now is a time when politicians need to be held accountable more than ever,” North Carolina GOP spokesman Rob Lockwood said in an email to The Daily Caller. “To suspend an election would be removing the surest mechanism that citizens have to hold politicians accountable: the right to vote.”

UPDATE 5:17 p.m.:

Perdue press secretary Chris Mackey claims the governor was joking when she made the comment.

“Come on … Gov. Perdue was obviously using hyperbole to highlight what we can all agree is a serious problem: Washington politicians who focus on their own election instead of what’s best for the people they serve,” Mackey said in an email to TheDC.

The Democrat Party is the party of Margaret Sanger, a Nazi sympathizer and fascist eugenicist who advocated abortion (see also here and here). Just like the Nazis. She’d be proud of Democrats; by now, they have murdered 54 innocent human beings in their abortion mills. And one day every single Democrat will stand before a just and outraged holy God and explain why they voted year after year for the holocaust of 54 million human beings.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has tumbled among GOP primary voters and now trails business executive Herman Cain in the race for the nomination, according to the latest IBOPE Zogby Poll.

Cain’s campaign appears to have picked up steam after a win in Florida’s Straw Poll this weekend, while Perry continues to suffer from lackluster performances in GOP debates, the most recent held last Thursday in Orlando.

Perry, at 18 percent, has tumbled by more than 20 percentage points over the past month, according to IBOPE Zogby numbers and is now second to Herman Cain, who leads the field with 28 percent.

Mitt Romney trails the others at number three, with 17 percent of the vote.

The poll, conducted Sept. 23-26 was done after Perry’s performance last Thursday in the most recent debate, but was still in the field as Cain took the Straw Poll win in Florida. Cain was the choice of only 8 percent of the GOP voters a month ago.

The worst news came for Michele Bachmann, who took just 4 percent of the votes — down from 34 percent on June 30.

I took an early stand supporting Rick Perry. And I STILL support Rick Perry. But I’ve always liked Herman Cain, too. My biggest reason for not supporting him was that he hadn’t demonstrated the ability to get a substantial following and WIN.

Perry has been abysmal in the three debates thus far. He just aint cutting the mustard. That isn’t fatal – if he can get his ‘A’ game working. But at this point his poor performances lead to the question: Does the guy even HAVE an ‘A game’?

On Perry’s side, my understanding is that the man had major back surgery, and that the tendency is that he starts out well in debates, and then fades as the pain from standing takes over. Pain has a way of being very distracting and interfering with the ability to focus and concentrate, and in my own experience when you’ve got a bad back or bad knees, standing is actually far worse than walking. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter; somehow the man simply has to come through in a major debate or he is going to (deservedly) fade away.

Cain has done well in the debates; personally, I believe either he or Newt Gingrich have won all three (with two out of three going to Gingrich). And while “debate skills” certainly don’t determine my choice of a candidate, that has got to be a factor.

Why has Bachmann tanked so? I believe she’s tanked for the exact same reason that Tim Pawlenty tanked. When Pawlenty tore into Bachmann, it really annoyed me and I lost a lot of respect for Pawlenty. And now here Bachmann is PERSONALLY attacking Rick Perry, and it really annoys me and I’ve lost a lot of respect for Michelle Bachmann.

Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann have chosen to blast away at Rick Perry – who had the lion’s share of the “conservative” vote. But if you like a candidate (the way I like Rick Perry), do you really think you can tear that candidate to pieces and then I’ll like the person who tore my candidate to pieces? And it’s not just that; it’s that Mitt Romney – the establishment “moderate” candidate – is laughing all the way to the nomination. If you want a conservative to win, the worst thing that can happen is that Bachmann, Santorum and Perry cancel each other out.

So with all that going on, it really doesn’t bother me that Herman Cain might be surging. At least none of the other candidates have placed him in a suicidal death grip – at least yet.

Ultimately, what I most want is for the GOP to take the White House away from the worst president in American history. Which means I’ll be a loyal soldier to whichever candidate emerges to take on our Marxist-in-Chief.

And, of course, Democrats who lecture us on “paying our fair share” while they either welch on their debts, refuse to contribute to charity, cheat on their taxes, or all damn three are a dime a dozen. Let’s have a few prominent examples: Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have largely welched on Hillary’s campaign debts. There’s Charlie Rangel, the man who chaired the committee that wrote the tax laws while not bothering to pay his own damn taxes. There’s “Turbo Tax” Timothy Geithner, the man in charge of the Treasury and I.R.S. who didn’t bother to pay his own taxes. There’s former Democrat candidate for president John Kerry, a millionaire, who tried to wriggle away like the worm he is from paying the taxes he should have paid on his yacht. There’s Kerry’s wife and fellow Democrat Teresa Heinz-Kerry, who in spite of inheriting the Heinz fortune actually pays less in taxes than the median American family. And then there’s a bunch of more garden variety cockroach Democrats such as Eric Holder, Tom Daschle, Bill Richardson, and Claire McCaskill. And the vile putrid bunch of Democrats running Bell, California.

These aren’t rich people who want to pay more in taxes; these are liberal elites who want YOU to pay more in taxes because they want to live off a government that keeps growing in size and in power.

Meanwhile, jobs get treated like cancer in the sense that we tax investment the way we tax cigarettes:

A key moment in the dueling Obama-House Republican visit to Silicon Valley Monday was when the wealthy, retired-early Google exec told President Obama to raise his taxes. Yes, you read that right.

“I don’t have a job, but that’s because I’ve been lucky enough to live in Silicon Valley for a while and work for a small startup down the street here that did quite well. So I’m unemployed by choice. My question is would you please raise my taxes?

“I would like very much to have the country to continue to invest in things like Pell Grants and infrastructure and job training programs that made it possible for me to get to where I am. And it kills me to see Congress not supporting the expiration of the tax cuts that have been benefiting so many of us for so long. I think that needs to change, and I hope that you will stay strong in doing that.”

After he was done meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for an hour Monday after the FB event, we chatted with GOP Whip, Rep. Kevin McCarthy for a bit. Kevin is a self-described Bakersfield guy from the other side of tracks (and a family full of Democrats). So why shouldn’t wealthy guys pay more taxes?

“You know that small businesses are the greatest creators of jobs,” McCarthy said. Between 2001-2007, he said, “if you had a company of 500 people or fewer, you added 7 million jobs. If you had 500 or more, you lost a million. The way that small businesses are run, (those kind of tax increases) punishes them.”

And 60 percent of those small businesses, he said, were five years old or younger. But the former entrepreneur said it is a lot harder to start a small business now.

Plus, McCarthy said, “Would you be willing to give a company more money if they didn’t have a budget? We haven’t had a budget passed out of the Senate in two years.”

On Monday at his LinkedIn event, the President contended that “we’ve cut taxes about 16 times since I’ve been in office for small businesses.”

Rep. Paul Ryan told me Monday he wasn’t sure where Obama was getting those numbers. And the White House hasn’t responded to a question about where he pulled those numbers from.

“They’d probably be small nickel-and-dime policies,” Ryan told us. If Obama was talking about “temporary tax rebates, they are a poor substitute for permanently high taxes….” they give small business owners “tremendous uncertainty.”

Ryan’s a small town Wisconsin guy. (Folks very near and dear to our heart.) But he doesn’t think taxing millionaires is the answer, either.

“The reason we tax cigarettes in this country is to get people to stop smoking,” he told us. “If you tax capital more, you get less capital. If you tax job-creators more, you get fewer jobs.”

If the rich guy at the Obama event was referring to taxing his capital gains income, that’s not economically smart to tax, either, Ryan said. “That’s the seed corn for economy, which gets invested in entrepreneurs and start-ups and small businesses.” Raising taxes would cut that supply off at a critical time — when banks aren’t loaning to small businesses as much.

McCarthy said the Silicon Valley visit wasn’t just a way for the top GOPers to suck up to Valley types — and, more important, their wallets. (A job which Obama and fellow Dems have become quiet adept at.) Even though, yes, Cantor had a fundraiser while in town.

“We’re not going on personality, we’re going on policy,” McCarthy said. “For too long, Obama’s Adminstration has been about politics and not policy. So we have no fear about going in and talking about our policy.”

I’m still searching for the poor guy who creates all the jobs. So far I haven’t found him yet. Please let me know if you run into him.

Until then, I’ll continue looking to the men and women Democrats hate and attack for all the job creation. And I’ll figure that job creation will start occurring shortly after Obama and his liberal thugs in Congress are out of power.

I pointed this out a coupld of weeks ago: when Obama said, “We’ve got more than a million unemployed construction workers ready to get dirty right now,” how exactly was that not the same damn thing as saying “We’ve got all kinds of shovel-ready projects”???

This is the exact same pork-laden boondoggle that massively failed three years ago. Obama is even using the exact same arguments to try to sell it. The only difference is he’s expressing the exact same arguments with different soundbites.

Washington, D.C.- U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made the following remarks on the Senate floor Thursday regarding the President’s visit to Ohio and the bipartisan opposition to his stimulus and tax hike proposals:

“Over the past week, President Obama has been traveling around the country trying to set a record for the number of times he can say the words ‘pass this bill right away’ in a single five-minute speech.

“And today, he’ll bring his act to a 50-year-old bridge that connects my own state of Kentucky with Ohio.

“Now, the purpose of this visit is clear: The President’s plan is to go out to this bridge and say that if only lawmakers in Washington would pass his second stimulus bill ‘right away’, then bridges like this one would get fixed — and that the only thing standing in the way of repairing them is people like me.

“Well, I would just make a couple of points about all this.

“First, I find it hard to take the President’s message all that seriously when his own Communications Director is over at the White House telling people he’s no longer interested in legislative compromise; and when the leaders of the President’s own party in Congress are treating this bill like an afterthought.

“We’d be more inclined to look at this so-called jobs bill if the President’s own staff and the members of his own party in Congress started taking it a little more seriously themselves.

“Second, I’d remind the President that the people of Kentucky and Ohio have heard this kind of thing before. Don’t forget: the President made the same promises when he was selling his first stimulus. It’s a message he brought to Ohio repeatedly.

“Here’s what he said two years ago this week at a stop in Warren, Ohio: ‘All across Ohio and all across the country, rebuilding our roads and our bridges … that’s what the Recovery Act has been all about.’

“Yet two and a half years later, what do we have to show for it: politically-connected companies like Solyndra ended up with hundreds of millions in taxpayer-backed money, and bridges like the one the President’s at today still need to be fixed.

“It’s worth noting, in fact, that this one company blew through more taxpayer money than the first stimulus allocated for every road and bridge in the entire state of Kentucky — combined.

“The President told Ohioans and Kentuckians the first stimulus would keep unemployment below 8% too.

“Yet two and a half years later, unemployment in both states is still above 9 percent.

“So we’ve heard these promises before, and I don’t think the President should expect anybody to fall for them again.

“I mean, how many stimulus bills do we have to pass before these bridges get fixed?

“How many Solyndras do we have to finance?

“How much money do we have to waste before the President makes good on the promises he’s already made?

“If a bridge needs fixing, by all means, let’s fix it.

“But don’t tell us we need to pass a half a trillion dollar stimulus bill and accept job-killing tax hikes to do it.

“Don’t tell the people of Kentucky they need to finance every turtle tunnel and solar panel company on some bureaucrat’s wish list in order to get their bridges fixed.

“And don’t patronize us by implying that if we just pass this second stimulus, that bridges will be fixed ‘right away.’

“The American people heard the same thing when the administration was selling the first stimulus, only to turn on their television sets two and a half years later to see the President having a big laugh over the fact that all those shovel-ready projects weren’t quite as shovel-ready as he thought they were.

“So I would suggest, Mr. President, that you think about ways to actually help the people of Kentucky and Ohio, instead of how you can use their roads and bridges as a backdrop for making a political point.

“If you’re truly interested in helping our state — if you really want to help our state — then come back to Washington and work with Republicans on legislation that will actually do something to revive our economy and create jobs. And forget the political theater.”

Amazingly, rather than work with Republicans to come up with a solution that could actually pass, Barack Obama NEVER ONCE picked up a phone and tried to talk to Republicans AT ANY TIME prior to his so-called “Jobs Speech.” He is a naked demagogue, and it is long-past time the American people realized that he is utterly naked of ideas that will do anything other than seek to get himself re-elected.

A former staffer to Rev. Jesse Jackson has filed a lawsuit against Jackson and his nonprofit Rainbow PUSH Coalition, claiming he was sexually harassed and discriminated against because he is gay.

According to the complaint, filed Sept. 16, Tommy R. Bennett worked for outreach organization Rainbow PUSH from July 2007 to Dec. 2009. During that time, he said he was subjected to a barrage of humiliating and discriminating behavior from both Jackson and a fellow staff member, Caroline Wiggins.

In one instance, the complaint said, Wiggins requested to be transferred from under Bennett’s supervision because of his sexual orientation, which was widely known around the office. She then allegedly told the rest of the staff she was glad she did not have to answer to Bennett anymore and “would make a limp wrist gesture towards Mr. Bennett whenever Mr. Bennett walked down the hallway.”

In 2008, soon after Wiggins was transferred, the complaint said she led a prayer during a volunteer meeting in which she stated, “bind these homosexual spirits that are in the office” and “get these homosexuals out of here and do it in Jesus’ name” — comments that were heard throughout the office. At that point, Bennett filed a Human Resources complaint but said he never got a response.

Wiggins left the organization for unspecified reasons soon after Bennett filed the complaint.

Later in 2008, Bennett was appointed Jackson’s travel assistant, during which time he said he was harassed by Jackson himself and made to do “demeaning and demoralizing tasks.”

He claims that he was instructed to do a number of “humiliating tasks,“ including ”escort women to [Jackson’s] room after work hours and clean up his room after sexual intercourse with women,” arrange a massage for Jackson, and bring Jackson Cialis from his room. For a trip to Tanzania, Bennett alleges he was asked to pack for Jackson, who “was not happy with his packing and started screaming, ‘motherf***er’ repeatedly.” In another instance, he alleges he was asked to pick up a prescription and apply it to a rash on Jackson’s inner thigh. When Bennett refused, he claims Jackson called him “little motherf***er.”

In the most lurid of the allegations described, Bennett alleges Jackson, dressed only in briefs, made implicit sexual advances towards him when describing a time when he got oral sex from a teacher. Read more in the complaint (.pdf) here.

Bennnett was placed on paid leave in May 2009, the complaint said, after an office intern falsely claimed Bennett had taken him to a gay bar, propositioned him and smoked marijuana with him. Although a subsequent investigation determined the allegations not to be true, Bennett was formally terminated in Dec. 2009, supposedly due to a lack of funding — despite the organization hiring a replacement and filling several other positions after he left.

According to the Chicago Tribune, in a joint response to a separate complaint Bennett filed earlier this year, Jackson and Rainbow PUSH said they “unequivocally deny Tommy Bennett’s false claims of harassment, retaliation and discrimination”:

“The organization does not condone or tolerate discrimination in any form,” the statement said. “His inflammatory allegations are an attempt to malign Rev. Jackson and the organization, and are hurtful and harmful to the progressive community. We are fully cooperating with the Chicago Commission on Human Relations and expect to be fully exonerated.”

Bennett is seeking at least $98,300 in lost income and benefits and $350,000 for emotional distress and other damages.

Just a bunch of princes (well, princesses anyway) of the realm.

I’m starting to realize that the only thing that is actually WORSE than a liberal secular humanist is a liberal “reverend.”

CBS News recently got their hands on secret recordings of conversations about Fast and Furious that took place between an ATF agent and a gun store owner, both of whom were located in the Phoenix area (and both of whom were thoroughly acquainted with Fast and Furious).

The recordings captured agent Hope McAllister talking with Andre Howard, owner of Lone Wolf Trading Company, at a time when Howard was noticeably worried that Fast and Furious was going to become public knowledge or be put under the microscope of a congressional investigation. Howard especially feared that Senator Charles Grassley might push for an inquiry of some kind. Thus at least four times in the recordings he can be heard mentioning Grassley, and one of those four times it’s to say someone needs to tell Grassley “to sit [his] a—down.”

What’s also interesting about the recordings is that although they were made in mid-March 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder’s name comes up quite a bit. And his name doesn’t come up because they’re afraid he’s going to find out about Fast and Furious but because he was the one they were counting on to deflect attention from it.

In other words, he was well aware of the operation by mid-March 2011, and this is somewhat ironic because in answering questions from Congressman Darrell Issa on May 3 he said he only learned of Fast and Furious “over the last few weeks.” This means he led Issa to believe the earliest he knew anything about the operation was sometime in April. Yet on the recordings (from mid-March), it is clear Holder was the one Howard hoped would stop the investigative momentum by responding to a letter regarding Fast and Furious from the House Oversight Committee:

HOWARD: “Holder has to respond to this tomorrow.”

McALLISTER: “Yeah, he’s gonna respond.”

HOWARD: “I know he is. And I assure you the media isn’t gonna like his response, because basically it’s gonna mirror what he’s told Grassley.”

McALLISTER: “Yeah.”

HOWARD: “He can’t deviate.” (Italics added.)

As Howard continues to express concern over what Holder will say, Agent MacAllister tries to calm him by saying she believed Holder & Co. would “come out with [something a] little more um b—-y…than they [had] in the past.”

In the next portion of the recording, former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke’s name is referenced. This is where agent MacAllister admits Burke had been more tenacious in handling Fast and Furious inquiries than Holder would be:

McALLISTER: “Well if, I mean, I’ve seen a rough copy of what our U.S. attorney here has sent up. Whether or not [Holder] has the balls to actually use it or not, I doubt it. But I mean, it’s pretty aggressive. The way I see it, our local U.S. attorney is extremely aggressive. [But] when it gets to D.C. …”

HOWARD: “Who, Emory [Hurley]?”

McALLISTER: “No, the U.S. attorney.”

HOWARD: “Burke, yeah, used to work under Clinton. …Talking about [Dennis] Burke?”

McALLISTER: “Mmm hmm.”

It’s somewhat surreal to hear Holder’s name, and to come to the immediate recognition that some of his answers to Issa don’t add up.

And it strikes a strange chord within one’s psyche to hear Burke’s name thrown around as the go getter and the hard hitter on Fast and Furious, and then to remember he’s the one who denied victim of crime status to the family of U.S. Border Agent Brian Terry. (God bless the family of Brian Terry.)

Hopefully these recordings will pull back the sheets on this massive cover-up once and for all.

As you listen to the tapes that are coming out of this scandal, it sounds a lot more like two mob thugs discussing all the various evidences of the crime to destroy or bury and a lot less like government law enforcement agents and people under those agents’ direct control discussing justice.

Well, Obama was a liar before Joe Wilson’s outburst and he remained a liar after Joe Wilson’s outburst. And it’s nice that every once-in-a-while a mainstream media outlet such as the Associated Press points that fact out.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says he wants to make sure millionaires are taxed at higher rates than their secretaries. The data say they already are.

“Warren Buffett’s secretary shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There is no justification for it,” Obama said as he announced his deficit-reduction plan this week. “It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million.”

On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

In his White House address on Monday, Obama called on Congress to increase taxes by $1.5 trillion as part of a 10-year deficit reduction package totaling more than $3 trillion. He proposed that Congress overhaul the tax code and impose what he called the “Buffett rule,” named for the billionaire investor.

The rule says, “People making more than $1 million a year should not pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class families pay.” Buffett wrote in a recent piece for The New York Times that the tax rate he paid last year was lower than that paid by any of the other 20 people in his office.

There may be individual millionaires who pay taxes at rates lower than middle-income workers. In 2009, 1,470 households filed tax returns with incomes above $1 million yet paid no federal income tax, according to the Internal Revenue Service. But that’s less than 1 percent of the nearly 237,000 returns with incomes above $1 million.

This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes, payroll taxes and other taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay an average of 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.

Lower-income households will pay less. For example, households making between $40,000 and $50,000 will pay an average of 12.5 percent of their income in federal taxes. Households making between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7 percent.

The latest IRS figures are a few years older — and limited to federal income taxes — but show much the same thing. In 2009, taxpayers who made $1 million or more paid on average 24.4 percent of their income in federal income taxes, according to the IRS.

Those making $100,000 to $125,000 paid on average 9.9 percent in federal income taxes. Those making $50,000 to $60,000 paid an average of 6.3 percent.

Obama’s claim hinges on the fact that, for high-income families and individuals, investment income is often taxed at a lower rate than wages. The top tax rate for dividends and capital gains is 15 percent. The top marginal tax rate for wages is 35 percent, though that is reserved for taxable income above $379,150.

With tax rates that high, why do so many people pay at lower rates? Because the tax code is riddled with more than $1 trillion in deductions, exemptions and credits, and they benefit people at every income level, according to data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’ official scorekeeper on revenue issues.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that 46 percent of households, mostly low- and medium-income households, will pay no federal income taxes this year. Most, however, will pay other taxes, including Social Security payroll taxes.

“People who are doing quite well and worry about low-income people not paying any taxes bemoan the fact that they get so many tax breaks that they are zeroed out,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. “People at the bottom of the distribution say, ‘But all of those rich guys are getting bigger tax breaks than we’re getting,’ which is also the case.”

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was pressed at a White House briefing on the number of millionaires who pay taxes at a lower rate than middle-income families. He demurred, saying that people who make most of their money in wages pay taxes at a higher rate, while those who get most of their income from investments pay at lower rates.

“So it really depends on what is your profession, where’s the source of your income, what’s the specific circumstances you face, and the averages won’t really capture that,” Geithner said.

President Obama has claimed that the “rich” aren’t paying “their fair share” and he likes to use Warren Buffet’s claim that Buffet pays less in income taxes to infer that Buffet’s situation the norm among our wealthier citizens.

Well it isn’t. And, in fact, any number of news organizations have pointed that out today.

President Barack Obama makes it sound as if there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries. . . . The data tell a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

Treasury Secretary Geithner yesterday declined to answer a key question about the president’s proposed ‘Buffett Rule’: How many millionaires and billionaires pay lower tax rates than middle-income families? The answer appears to be this: not many. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has crunched the numbers and found that Warren Buffett and his secretary are the exception to the rule. For the most part, the wealthy pay a significantly higher percentage of their income in taxes than middle-income workers.

There’s one small problem: The entire Buffett Rule premise is false . . . . [N]early all millionaires still paid a rate that is more than twice the 8.9% average rate paid by those earning between $50,000 and $100,000, and more than three times the 7.2% average rate paid by those earning less than $50,000. The larger point is that the claim that CEOs are routinely paying lower tax rates than their secretaries is Omaha hokum.

And the WSJ calls it what it really is:

We rehearse all of this because it shows that the real point of Mr. Obama’s Buffett Rule and his latest deficit proposal isn’t tax justice or good tax policy. It is all about re-election politics.

[W]ith some 14 months until Election Day 2012, Obama’s speech yesterday essentially marked the end of the governing season and the beginning of the campaign. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer admitted as much to the New York Times. ‘The popular narrative is that we sought compromise in a quixotic quest for independent votes. We sought out compromise because a failure to get funding of the government last spring and then an extension of the debt ceiling in August would have been very bad for the economy and for the country.’ Pfeiffer added, ‘We were in a position of legislative compromise by necessity. That phase is behind us.

If there is any transparency at all to this administration, it is this – there every move is obvious and it is clear this is being pushed out there for political reasons, not reasons having to do with what is best for the country.

Do you know why – even as Obama continually lies and demagogues the rich in his Marxist class-warfare campaign – he never actually says just how much more “the rich” should pay? Because the stock market would completely TANK and remain tanked until the fool resigned from office in the disgust and disgrace he so richly deserves.

So he demonizes in the abstract. Absolutely NOTHING Obama is saying has a single melting snowball’s chance in the basement of hell of becoming actual U.S. policy; this is pure political posturing and pandering as Obama tries to regain some toehold with his disintegrating base.

A president with a conscience would be trying to actually fix the problems in Washington and reach out to enact legislation that could make a positive difference. But “conscience” rules out Obama. The man is a demagogue and a fearmonger to the very core of his being.

Prior to giving his speech before the joint session of Congress a couple of weeks ago, it is utterly incredible to note that Obama made ZERO attempt to contact Speaker John Boehner to work out some kind of deal that would get through Congress and become law. Obama doesn’t want solutions; he wants to demonize and blame other people for the mess that HE and ONLY HE has created. Obama is the president; but the buck stops anywhere but with him.

So blame George Bush. Because even three years after leaving office, George Bush remains more of a president and more of a leader than Barack Obama ever was or ever will be.

Warren Buffett, President Obama’s pet billionaire, spends a great deal of time calling for tax increases on wealthy people. He began a recent New York Times op-ed, entitled “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” as follows:

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

That’s right, serfs: anything your benevolent “leaders” in Washington allow you to keep is a “blessing” that has been “showered” upon you. All money rightfully belongs to the State. It’s about time you spotted owls got with the program.

Funny thing is, it turns out Buffett was being… shall we say… disingenuous when he claimed his “leaders” never got around to asking for his “shared sacrifice.” His company, Berkshire Hathaway?, has been fighting the IRS tooth and nail to avoid paying its federal tax bill for nearly a decade.

How much of the State’s rightful money has this hypocrite been clutching in a white-knuckled death grip? Oh, only about a billion dollars or so. Bill Wilson of Americans for Limited Government tallies up the bill:Using only publicly-available documents, a certified public accountant (CPA) detailed Berkshire Hathaway’s tax problems to ALG researcher Richard McCarty. Now, the American people have a better idea of how much in back taxes the company could owe Uncle Sam.

According to page 56 of the company report, “At December 31, 2010… net unrecognized tax benefits were $1,005 million”, or about $1 billion. McCarty explained, “Unrecognized tax benefits represent the company’s potential future obligation to the IRS and other taxing authorities. They have to be recorded in the company’s financial statements.”He added, “The notation means that Berkshire Hathaway’s own auditors have probably said that $1 billion is more likely than not owed to the government.”

On top of this tax bill, figure the value of the time IRS agents have invested trying to collect it – they don’t work cheap, and we pay their salaries – and the resources Buffett’s people have invested fighting back. All of which would have been saved if Buffett simply practiced what he preached, and willingly handed over his fortune to the brilliant and compassionate “leaders” he commands the rest of us to support without resistance.

Warren Buffet is no different from the other liars and frauds orbiting Barack Obama?. His hypocrisy just runs billions of dollars deeper. When it comes to “shared sacrifice,” you do the sacrificing, and they do the sharing.

And, of course, Democrats who lecture us on “paying our fair share” while they either welch on their debts, refuse to contribute to charity, cheat on their taxes, or all damn three are a dime a dozen. Let’s have a few prominent examples: Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have largely welched on Hillary’s campaign debts. There’s Charlie Rangel, the man who chaired the committee that wrote the tax laws while not bothering to pay his own damn taxes. There’s “Turbo Tax” Timothy Geithner, the man in charge of the Treasury and I.R.S. who didn’t bother to pay his own taxes. There’s former Democrat candidate for president John Kerry, a millionaire, who tried to wriggle away like the worm he is from paying the taxes he should have paid on his yacht. There’s Kerry’s wife and fellow Democrat Teresa Heinz-Kerry, who in spite of inheriting the Heinz fortune actually pays less in taxes than the median American family. And then there’s a bunch of more garden variety cockroach Democrats such as Eric Holder, Tom Daschle, Bill Richardson, and Claire McCaskill. And the vile putrid bunch of Democrats running Bell, California.

Another thing to recognize – and another example of the disgusting hypocrisy that today is the quintessential defining characteristic of the entire Democrat Party – is that “The Warren Buffet Rule” wouldn’t actually even apply to Warren Buffett. This is because of a fundamental disingenuous misrepresentation that Obama has deliberately peddled conflating income taxes with capital gains taxes.

Warren Buffett pays low taxes because first and foremost, he is a tax cheat who has not paid a BILLION DOLLARS in tax debt and who has been fighting his obligation to the last lawyer even as he hypocritically demands that everyone else pay more taxes like he himself won’t. But it goes beyond that. Another simple fact is that Buffett has structured his income in such a way as to MINIMIZE his income tax liability – just like nearly all wealthy people (and especially the wealthy liberal hypocrite jackasses) – do. Warren Buffett has his assets in trusts and foundations and structures his assets that he takes income as capital gains – with are taxed at less than half the rate of income tax. He doesn’t HAVE to do that; it’s just that this lying fraud chooses to do that to reduce his tax liability as much as possible.

What would happen if capital gains were taxed at the same rate as income tax – as Obama suggests we begin doing?

Kiss investment goodbye. Kiss the U.S. economy goodbye. Kiss millions and millions of jobs goodbye. And kiss the next genuine Great Depression hello.

Whenever a person invests in a stock or a company, there is a very good chance that that person may well lose money. It is a RISK. And if you lose, the most you can deduct is something like $3,500 on your taxes. But if you win, the government currently takes 15% of whatever you gained. It’s a good deal for the federal government, if you lose, you lose and the government loses nothing; if you gain, the government helps itself to your winnings. And the simple fact of the matter is that as an investor loses the ability to profit from his investment – while receiving no similar increase in his ability to be protected from his losses – his or her incentive to invest dries up like cheap plastic in a hot and arid desert.

And unless the poor are going to start risking THEIR money to fund and build businesses that in turn hire workers, the American economy will pretty much just fade away and go poof.

All that to say that unless we start attacking investment by attacking capital gains, the Buffett rule would hypocritically most certainly NOT apply to the very man it’s named after.

Up to this point, Obama’s entire presidency has consisted in making false promises, lying, demagoguing and demonizing his opponents and imposing failed “solutions” that have made what was bad far worse.

And as the Liar-in-Chief goes into full-fledged campaign mode, it appears he is merely picking up speed to accelerate all of the above.